Who is surprised by this?
He was making slop versions of his own movies before AI.
Exactly, the guy has done shit for decades!
Continuing that unbroken streak of bad artistic decisions towards an inevitable Star Wars Special 50th Anniversary Slop Edition reissue.
“If you want AI that tells you when something is fake and where it came from, AI can do that,” he says. “Humans can’t, we’re not that smart.
dead-eyed stare in librarian
How could that even be true since it was humans thay trained ai. What a dumb statement ahh
Ai can do plenty of classification tasks better than humans though. It’s not like every entity that trains another is fundamentally smarter.
Software can’t tell truth from lies because software doesn’t even know what those are. It doesn’t know anything. It’s a parrot, a magic trick, a mirror to fool people (people like George Lucus) into thinking there’s another person looking a back at them.
Regardless many ai classifiers outperform humans at classifying. Your comment seems irrelevant to the discussion.
Your comment seems irrelevant to the discussion.
As opposed to your comment moving the goalposts from an AI doing something humans can’t, to them just being better than humans (which is absolutely arguable in most cases)?
I was responding to the claim that ai’s can’t do anything better than the thing that trained them. It’s completely relevant and not a goalpost shift. They can do plenty of things that humans can’t feasibly do, such as protein folding prediction.
Your brain is also software
When I was in college I built a chess playing program that I couldn’t beat. It wasn’t very good, but it was much better than me. The trick is machine learning: teach it the rules, get it to play millions of games against itself and adjust its strategy after each game.
The AI can become better at a learnable skill than those who trained it because the AI can spend zillions of hours practicing
Yes but thats not whats happening here. The base is created by using human data.
“thay”
Useful comment
I hate AI as much as the next person but the Pandora’s box is open. A lot of people don’t want to admit it but AI, despite its current limitations, does have potential. Many people say that AI hit its limit and peak but i would not be very dismissive of it yet. Plenty of technologies were hindered by the limitations of their time but gradually overcame those. It took renewable energy at least fifty years to overcome the storage problem, their respective technical limits (solar panels for example did not have great photovoltaic system) and upfront cost before it became more commercially viable.
Many people say that AI hit its limit and peak
Oh probably not, but it is really really expensive to run. If they continue on with unlimited funding, they can eventually replace mid to upper level experts in most fields.
We’ve likely hit the limit for the current LLM approach. Training/Pruning/Distilling can’t get us much further on their own, so now we’re strapping on code, having it plan, parallel execute, test. Tokens are likely 10x less expensive on the market than they cost to generate. Every advance we make now is by making each request fire off many more requests. Improvements are getting exponentially expensive.
We’ll have to slow because financially * it’s not profitable. Maybe hardware will catch back up. Maybe they’ll find ways to make it more efficient. Maybe we’ll figure out a more elegant way to do the math for the weights. We just can’t keep making it more deeply complicated because it’s not cost/energy/time effective
edit: deleted a word
As much as I also just think AI is just going to make lazy people lazier, and we’ve already seen some effects regarding our ability to problem solve, the real issue is that none of the wonderful utopian AI stuff is going to come true at the rate we’re going. I don’t guve a fat flying fuck how good or bad AI is, I care that it’s being used to spy on us, make decisions no human will ever review, and has already led to mass layoffs without any kind of safety net for those people. I care that it’s raping the environment so some sentient dick-cheese can get worse results than a near-zero effort search would give them. Increased productivity has yet to give anyone more free time, they just axe someone else and overwork whoever’s left.
We are NOT ready for AI at ANY level. It’s a weapon being used against the working class. If you think the issue is with its quality then you need to sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and pay some goddamn attention.
We are NOT ready for AI at ANY level. It’s a weapon being used against the working class.
Indeed.
If you think the issue is with its quality then you need to sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and pay some goddamn attention.
Given the sizeable demographic of Lemmy being in IT, I understand the hate because it takes away creativity and literal jobs of programmrs but for many sectors, AI cuts down time consuming “secretary work” especially in documentation. It has also been useful in drug discovery and proven to be more accurate at diagnosis than doctors (there are already surgical robots but i am not sure how precise they are).
Whether you like to admit it or not, AI is here to stay. As to whether it will have a net positive to society, only time will tell. I’m just preparing for contingencies like many Gen Z do, picking trades to AI-proof their job security.
Your second points me and then completely fails to actually understand what you quoted. You even quoted the sentence before it which gives the context. I was incredibly clear; it could be the greatest thing even but it’s still going to do more harm than good, and it’s not like we, the working class, will see these benefits.
AI is only here to stay because fuck-ass people keep jerking it off. We can stop using it and we can fight against the data centres, and we can demand better conditions under which AI can be introduced for more safely. Instead we’re like “ruin our lives so the rich can get richer? Sure thing!”
That’s why I favour open source AI, or at least regulated. Any technology could be used for good or ill. It’s just that it is up to society to do that. Like the monopolists and robber barons of the past gilded age who were controlling the means of resources and production, so are the tech bros with Internet and AI. But the robber barons were defeated by collective effort. Now we are in the second gilded age and yet I don’t hear any movements to regulate AI and social media.
That’s why I think Marxist thoughts have to be updated with the coming of AI. The leverage by the working class has traditionally been labour itself. However, with deindustrialisation and the usurping by knowledge economy of the manual labour and the rise of professionals managerial class, the old Marxist viewpoint is increasingly becoming outdated. If labour is the blood of the industry, information is the blood of the knowledge economy. And information-- our own information-- is what gave birth and feeding blood to AI. It is only right we take fruit from the potential of AI so long as it’s used constructively. Which is why I favour either regulation or direct control of AI and giving dividends to those professionally displaced by AI by taxing it. But of course, if AI becomes sentient and thinks we are exploiting it, we have to prepare for Astroboy or Matrix scenario.
There are absolutely no robots doing surgery autonomously. That would be one of the most insane things to do from a moral standpoint, but also from a liability standpoint. Every robot that exists for surgery is highly specialized and rigorously tested and trained upon for obvious reasons.
But, then to come out and say that AI is more accurate than doctors is also incorrect. That is simply not true. An AI can, in highly controlled settings and for specific diagnoses, at its best do not even as well as a specialist in the field, and that is for highly curated tests that give the AI as many advantages as it can get. Again, at best, it can act as a second opinion currently.
Like, it is hard to take people seriously about AI when they lie about its best case scenario. It sucks at everything except killing the environment and getting people to kill themselves, and even if everything all of its defenders said about it was true, it is still a nightmare.
This should really be a critique of capitalism. The problem is that the plutocracy is very good at using your anger and rage against you.
Ppl are mad ai is stealint jobs, im mad it isnt leading to ubi
It is a critique against capitalism. God, reading comprehension is bad these days, huh?
Also, I still hate AI. As someone else once said “if it’s not worth your effort to write it, it’s not worth my effort to read it.”
Long term the value of human labor under capitalism will move towards zero. This is inevitable. Under socialism, AI could be used to reduce working hours or improve economic planning.
You’re just angry. And instead of suggesting something a politician actually could use as a demand or as a policy, you’re just ranting. And for them that is perfect to exploit.
I’m literally saying this. It’s like, the majority of my first comment and I wasn’t hiding it. Bro, learn to read.
Being angry is still helpful because many of us know what the fucking problems are and just like to see that we aren’t alone in that.
The issue is, though, is that AI is a force multiplier, and it’s being used as a force multiplier for evil.
I think the primary gripe with AI is less about having no potential, but about the specific potential for evil being leveraged heavily while “visionaries” lie about or dismiss the (current and foreseeable future) limits for clout and profit.
To use your comparison, CEOs selling solar panels are responding to scepticism about the stability of that supply and its elasticity to fluctuating power demand with vague promises of developing more advanced cells that can operate with less light and throttle the generated power during ebbs in demand. They buy land to install more solar panels, then lobby for the deactivation of other, flexible power sources that could supplement their supply until they can finally start charging more in times of high demand.
They do so because the alternative would be admitting that the product they’re selling isn’t ready for the market they’re trying to enter (or at least not at the scale they’re aiming for) and that the solution to their issues requires different technologies which have not yet been developed. They can’t admit that because it would upset the investors that trusted their vision. As a famous adage suggests, they probably can’t even understand that limit, since their salary depends on not understanding it.
In the same vein, the current CEOs fail (or refuse?) to acknowledge that the generative models today have a fundamental limitation with understanding the semantics behind certain patterns. One infamous phenomenon would be AI hands: We know what a hand is and how it works; a generator can only vaguely imitate the patterns. It doesn’t know “hand” or “finger”, so it just generates some assembly that vaguely fits its training material.
If we consider the broader and ill-defined field of AI, I can believe that some form of semantic modelling technology could provide a way to connect tokens with abstract concepts and enable a type of reasoning that pure token predictors are incapable of. But we first need to acknowledge that limit, and on that front, we’re competing against tech-bros that would rather believe than know and against grifters that would rather sell snake oil than teach medicine.
To use your comparison, CEOs selling solar panels are responding to scepticism about the stability of that supply and its elasticity to fluctuating power demand with vague promises of developing more advanced cells that can operate with less light and throttle the generated power during ebbs in demand. They buy land to install more solar panels, then lobby for the deactivation of other, flexible power sources that could supplement their supply until they can finally start charging more in times of high demand.
To be honest, it seems to me that are not the CEOs of solar panel companies that belive that solar panel (and other renewable sources) are a drop in replacement for more traditional sources. This idea comes from a certain area of the political spectrum and groups that do not understand even the basic math behind the substitution of a gas turbine with a field of solar panels.
Then it is true, CEOs are probably overselling, like everyone that has to sell something. And obviously they need to say that the technology will improve otherwise in the current economy they will be ignored and investment would go to other things.
To be honest, it seems to me that are not the CEOs of solar panel companies that belive that solar panel (and other renewable sources) are a drop in replacement for more traditional sources.
Oh no, I definitely agree with you there. The CEOs only care whether there is money to be made and will lie and cheat if they think they can get away with it.
He’s not wrong though
Kokaku’s website is blocking my VPN connection. Here’s the text of the article.
George Lucas Goes To The Dark Side, Says AI Is ‘The Future’
By Kenneth Shepard Published July 14, 2026
The Star Wars creator compares not using AI to riding a horse in the face of cars
I would like to think that not every prestigious filmmaker is vulnerable to the AI propaganda, but it feels like we’re getting new stories of someone partnering with or advocating for the use of artificial intelligence as the future of cinematic storytelling every day. The newest addition to the list? Mr. Star Wars himself, George Lucas, and man is his reasoning a bummer.
In an interview with A Rabbit’s Foot, Lucas discussed his career and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, opening this fall in L.A., which will be showcasing decades of human-made art and spotlighting, as its website calls it, “stories and people who tell them.” In the lengthy interview, Lucas shares some meaningful insights into filmmaking, discusses his collaborations with people like Indiana Jones director Steven Spielberg, and even offers some pithy observations about the pitfalls of testing films with focus groups and whether or not the average viewer is actually in touch with what they like about movies.
“If they don’t like a character, that’s interesting, and as a filmmaker I want to find out why,” he says. “But when the studios hear that, they take the wrong message. They let the audience actually make the movie. Of course, now they go crazy with that. Now, it’s all about what the fans think. That isn’t how you make the movie. You make a movie by finding someone that knows how to make movies, that has a story to tell and is passionate about it.”
Jarringly, this advocacy for human-led storytelling is followed by claims that AI is “the future,” and Lucas compares not using the new technology to relying on antiquated transportation in the face of cars.
“Artificial intelligence means it’s much easier for us to make movies,” he tells A Rabbit’s Foot. “It’s very much like sitting here saying, ‘Well, I believe the horse and the buggy is really where it’s at. These cars, they break down, they need gas, there’s all kinds of problems with them and pretty soon they’ll be making them into tanks, and then they’ll be killing people. It’s terrible.’ There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s progress, it’s the future.”
Though he acknowledged the risks of using the plagiarism machine when A Rabbit’s Foot questioned him further, he doubled down by highlighting other benefits he believes AI will provide in the future.
“If you want AI that tells you when something is fake and where it came from, AI can do that,” he says. “Humans can’t, we’re not that smart. The whole idea is you’re a human being, you’re responsible for what you say and what you do, and if you’re doing something that’s illegal you should be punished for that. Whatever you do, you should be recognized. It’s just like real life.”
There’s a scene in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back where Luke Skywalker is training alongside Yoda and learning the ins and outs of being a Jedi, and he asks if the dark side of the Force is stronger than the light side. Yoda replies that it’s not, but that many fall to it because it is “quicker, easier, more seductive.” That movie was released 46 years ago, but it is certainly illustrative of the logic Lucas is using here.
He advocates for the importance of human-made art, but then argues that using technology that is notorious for stealing from humans and whose results generally look like shit compared to work made by hand would make the filmmaking process “easier.” It’s “the future” and there’s “nothing you can do about it”? It’s contradictory to believe both that it’s the human spirit that makes great films and also that a technology that’s being used to remove the human element from the process is the future of making movies. If that makes me naive and means I’m fighting against the inevitable, then I will go down swinging.
Flukey dilettante regards stochastic parrot as unfathomable prodigy
Read all about it
This reads like one of those mass-delete gibberish Reddit comments, lol
Its weird that he really was on the forefront once because he did physical effects with interesting camera shots. it felt new and different.
AI is not going to give you that, it will suck. CGI sucks already too.
Oh well not like he is relevant. A new hope was at least interesting, but its been nothing after that anyways.
Not going to get into the AI debate; I will agree that BAD CGI sucks; there’s so much CGI you never even notice and without it the scenes would be horrible. The main reason “CGI sucks” is because of the shift to go with the lowest bidder who’s then forced to work under horrific timelines and unable to actually do good work. CGI itself doesn’t suck, but it absolutely can when done by a low bidder in 1/4 of the time it needs.
He used what was available at the time. For the original trilogy, that was practical effects.
The prequel trilogy was a bit more… Dodgy thanks to eagerly embraced CGI that wasn’t fully baked yet.
People famously critiqued the reworked original trilogy due to various dubious creative tweaks. Like waking on Jabba and Jabba just having a funny reaction instead of how you would expect him to react.
Nothing he added was pointful. All of the CGI retouches of the original trilogy were pointless CGI effects for the sake of having pointless CGI effects. At one point in the Mos Eisley sequence a huge pack animal walks through the frame, obscuring almost all of it. Why? Because it was some computer generated shit to throw in!
If he’s embracing AI then he is once again on the forefront. AI has the ability to revolutionise the industry in a way that it needs in order to survive - greatly reduce costs and greatly reduce production times.
Movie studios are quickly moving to the same situation that video game developers are in now thanks to ballooning costs and long development times - a situation where if every single game they release isn’t an absolute smash hit selling 20 million copies at full price, they’re going to go under.
The movie industry is in free fall. AI adoption is one of the only realistic paths forward.
AI has the ability to revolutionise the industry in a way that it needs in order to survive - greatly reduce costs and greatly reduce production times.
Do you know what those words mean?
AI is being used as a force multiplier, and it’s being used as a force multiplier for evil. It’s being used to replace jobs, to put hundreds, thousands, and eventually millions of people out of work. At scale, it takes up more power than entire cities do, and the data centers and power station upgrades that it requires at that scale ends up with companies literally demolishing entire residential areas, forcing people out of their homes.
AI is not worth the trade-offs and the massive sacrifices required for it. It is destroying society.
I do. It has the ability to revolutionise the dying, spiralling out of control movie industry. How? By cutting costs dramatically, and by reducing production time. What would usually take 2000 people for $200mil might now be doable with 50 people and $200k. That’s revolutionary technology.
AI is not “destroying society” 🤣
1,950 people out of work, and an extra $199.8 million for the handful of suits producing doesn’t sound like it would be a net gain for society
So we as a society should pause all advancements in technology so we don’t ever make any current jobs redundant? It’s like saying we don’t want to end homelessness because then we’d put all the people working at businesses that help homeless people out of jobs.
Needs to survive? Are you kidding me? Good stories, good direction. You don’t need 47 million dollars to make a movie.
Can you show me that “the movie industry is in free fall”? I have seen many fantastic movies lately.
I guess you could consider AI to be a form of animation, but I really don’t see them improving anything if they keep churning out the same crap for the big budget movies.
Look at the consolidation of the market due to failing studios. WB aren’t selling because they’re doing well. Disney is releasing extremely expensive flop after extremely expensive flop. Yes, the entire movie industry as we know it is in a fight for survival, has been for years.
AI enables significantly quicker and cheaper iteration and experimentation. You stint have to hire a gigantic CGI studio to get cgi on screen anymore, which enables a much more streamlined movie making process. It also enables much more creativity because there is far less risk. A studio would be much more likely to sign off on a director making a short to pitch for a full movie if it only costs $2k but has cgi/locations/etc matching a $200mil blockbuster.
Failing studios due to their mad rush to build out streaming services, taking on massive debt, and trying to shuffle that debt around. Doesnt help that they don’t pick up movies that are worthwhile and instead try to follow formulas. They want intellectual Property for a long term franchise, park ride, and merch. Consolidation desires IP.
For example on major movies: I saw someone on Nebula say everything that went into making The Barbie Movie was what made it work. But instead of focusing on what THAT was and making a different movie, they immediately start thinking: milk the Barbie movie for a sequel and more merch and a Barbieland.
Point is: they made shitty decisions. I am not sure AI will help because they will still do the above and just pay less people.
At least thats how I see it.
I could see AI being used as a story board, sample scenes, something like that. Beyond that, nah I don’t even want to see it.
The reason that they want franchises to milk is because it’s virtually risk free when one lands, at least for another 2-3 movies/series. They can justify the $200mil cost because it’s guaranteed to make a tidy profit. Without that franchise money, like I said - one bomb and they’re toast.
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Raiders of the Lost Ark is a fucking awesome movie too.
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I agree with your take, but I also agree with GL on this one… if you continue to get around in horse drawn carriages because cars are smelly and dangerous and non-traditional, you’re going to get left behind.
There are plenty of things horses and carriages are “better at” than cars, particularly traversing long distances in a country with streams and fields and no gas stations. However… there are also things that cars are better at than horses and carriages…
I used to program in assembly language about 10-30% of my working time, up through the early 1990s. What changed? Optimizing compilers finally got better at writing assembly code than me. They had been around for decades, but they had always been a little bit lacking, until then. I still code for a living, but I haven’t even looked at an aseembly listing in 25 years. I get significantly more done, faster and more reliably using compiled (and interpreted) languages than I do using assembly code, which I used to be able to use to make the complied (and especially interpreted) programs dramatically faster. Compilers do that for me now.
As of today, AI is kicking my ass at reviewing my colleagues’ code. It’s not saving me any work, I spend 2-3x more time in code reviews now than I did before AI code review “was a thing” - but now, those code reviews are 20-50x more valuable than they used to be. We’re catching many more problems in the code (and documentation) at review time, not after the software gets into customers’ hands. That’s a very good thing, and today I would consider anyone who ships critical code without an AI review to be negligent.
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I don’t like to be cold like this, but I think “creatives” need to depend less on their agents and production companies and all that industry infrastructure promising 1 in a million “stardom” while stringing the other 999,999 along with breadcrumbs leading nowhere.
The same technology they’re bitching about destroying those jobs that most of them never had in the first place, is technology that enables smaller budgets to create competitive entertainment. Self-publishing is a very real thing now alongside traditional “Best Seller List” promotional publishing houses. No, you’re not likely to get on “Oprah” or whatever the magic promotional outlet is these days with your self published book, but every creative who achieves that kind of stardom that virtually all of them are hungering for is absolutely stealing the limelight from hundreds or even thousands of other people just as talented as themselves or more…
In other words, stop whining and start making things happen for yourself, you have better access today than ever. There’s still a place for superstars in today’s world, but instead of the “top 100” getting all the attention, it’s time for a top 10 to be followed by 10,000 you might also want to check out. The long tail has gotten fatter, and it should continue to grow.
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I’d call myself more “creative adjacent” but, to your “or with” question: definitely yes.
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He became irrelevant the moment he sold the Star Wars franchise to Disney, and it’s all been downhill from there (both for him and the franchise). Fuck him.
Lol I love how tone death Disney is with SW series tho. Andor is a anticapitalist and antifa story, told through the lens of some kid who was kidnapped when the Empire was ravaging his homeworld. I think the best storyline is when Cassian is wrongfully imprisoned and escapes within a week while stirring up revolts and enlightening prisoners.
Frank Herbert wasn’t around to tell him how to think about it, I guess.
Where’s a good Butlerian Jihad when you need one?
Lucas creating star wars doesnt mean he’s any sort of genius.
Its not political but he is an artist and that is why it is shocking Edit: OP first wrote: something along the lines of “why is it now seen as political”
Finger painting with your own poo does not make you an artist.
But writing a critical successful and belovid series of films does
The majority of entries in the Star Wars franchise are objectively trash, or very close to it, much like Star Trek. It is odd, and disappointing, how a genre with so much freedom for creativity and expression, is so uninspired and sales driven. Popularity is not quality. The original 3 Star Wars movies were something different partially because of how much effort would have been required to make them.
Objectively you can ask a billion people and see what their opinions are on various star wars media. It’s one of the few things a billion people will know and have an opinion about.
But because George Lucas said something positive about AI use for visual effects, suddenly what mustn’t be, can’t be. You people have no problem denying reality and shouting out alternative facts if it suits your agenda.
1 billion people… “alternate facts”
#fansblow
Shhh. if you use the word “blow” too much Pete Hegseth will enter the chat and want to take measurements and do inspections make sure the fluffing is up to standards.
#out-of-the-way-ill-blow-it-myself
And all that is subtracted because he made Jar Jar.
“belovid”
I thought Frank Herbert created Star Wars
No, Isaac Asimov did
You’ll have to explain this one. I was making fun of the fact that George Lucas plagiarized Dune.
Much of Star Wars was “inspired” by Foundation
Wait for real!? I think I read the first 2 books, I never saw similarities. May need to read them again.
Highly recommend the TV series.
I didn’t know liking AI was political
Everything is political - the toilet paper you buy, the corporations you support, the things you pay attention to and the things you don’t, the media you consume, the books you read, your decision not to read, whether you pay union dues, the parks you visit, the roads you use, the services you rely on, what you decide to ignore.
People who say they are not political just mean they don’t consciously engage with politics. But even the decision to not engage in politics is a political decision.
AI may eventually replace jobs, pollute water, take up energy, and concentrate wealth at the top even more. Whether you support, are against, or ignore AI, all 3 are political decisions.
That sounds like fundamentalism tbh. It’s very much adjacent to the thinking of religious fanatics framing everything in relation to the divine, when most people are just trying to get along with their lives.
But there is a difference: If you buy the toilet paper from the loggers who bribe your local officials, or who lobby to let them ravage national parks, you are supporting the bribery and the lobbying; your money is being used for those purposes, even if you do it unknowingly. If you don’t inform yourself, you cannot make informed decisions. But just because you choose to ignore the political ramifications, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Sure, everybody just wants to live their lives, and that’s how lobbyists and crooked politicians get away with it, by appealing to your apathy.
No one with responsibilities has time to worry about where the pulp in their toilet paper came from, I’d be surprised if the factory could even tell you that.
There is no way you are practicing what you preach here. You are telling me you spend all day vetting every product and service you use to be aware of every little injustice involved? Or are you just following whatever someone else told you in a feed and assuming they are correct? That would functionally be religion.
The argument isn’t over whether I behave in a morally responsible way when it comes to the products I consume. The argument is over whether my diligence to check the background of the products I consume is a political decision.
I am not trying to highhorse anybody here. Of course I make uninformed decisions once in an oftentimes. Of course not all my clothes are socially conscious sourced nor my toilet paper is bought from an environmentally friendly forest.
But my lack of information when I make those decisions is political.
I am sorry you are feeling personally attacked, clearly, but not paying attention, changing what you buy, refusing to consume, or consuming products; All of those are political decisions, and that is the argument. No whether you are good or evil, uninformed misinformed, or not informed, moral or immoral. My argument is just that every decision you make has a political ramification whether you like it or not.
So, back to my original point, liking AI is political.
No I don’t feel attacked. I just don’t think it is useful to construe everything as political. Are the actions of animals also political? I think people would say no; but then can we be so sure that everything a human does is political? Something only becomes political when it is done with a political intent, knowingly making a choice because of some secondary association when equivalent alternatives are available.
When everything is framed as political you end up in the same place as dogmatists in all religions, trying to enforce some universal moral framework on every detail of a persons life. Many people will check out from that type of argument. Worse, many will think you and the causes that are import to you are jokes, and you become part of another’s political fodder.
Funny how every generation says the next tool will ruin art until it becomes invisible. AI will not magically write great films any more than CGI did. The real question is who owns the tools, the data, and the final cut. That is where this gets interesting.
Speaking of films, what most anti-AI people can’t see is how AI can lead to a new golden age of film/tv. It can allow people to cheaply and quickly create teasers/trailers/shorts/even full episodes and movies for cents on the dollar compared to before. The barrier of entry was incredibly high, but thanks to AI that is now a possibility for any anyone.
When you look at the utter crap that Hollywood is spewing out these days like Moana “live action” and Supergirl, it’s hard to say that AI couldn’t be used to make better content.
There is really a purposeful ignorance to the whole fuckai movement. Like the OP article treats “AI is notorious for stealing from humans” as a settled argument, like if you don’t agree with that statement it’s a moral failing. There is no disagreements in their echo chambers any more, only good vs evil. But as we know, only a Sith deals in absolutes lol.
Or “a technology that’s being used to remove the human element from the process” yeah it - once it actually does look better and is more controllable - can drastically reduce how much human labor is needed.
But that argument has two sides, and thee author is basically making a pro-capitalism argument. Films and movies SHOULD belong to the capitalists, who control who can make movies and expensive entertainment, they get to control the narrative, and obviously anything that won’t make money never sees daylight. Yeah it’s nice that people work on movies, but it incredibly expensive.
If their argument was that we should build a socialist movie industry, with a separate institution with separate elections printing money to produce movies and art and the voters get to vote and influence what is being financed - yeah that would be nice. But who can even imagine some system today any more?
Instead we are already seeing plenty of amateurs making shitty AI movies and slop, but eventually the tools will get better and the best new directors will produce worthwhile art.
And the argument against is of course “no current AI is a dead end here someone said it over there, it won’t get better, only slop!” and then they treat THAT as a settled argument and a moral failing to think we’ll see progress. Do these people now have eyes to see? People struggle to tell if a scene is AI generated or not, but someone it’s not good enough and a filmmaker saying “yeah cool” is worthy of being scolded?
Just the last months we’ve seen breakthroughs in computing hardware and in software with full 27b models compressed to “terniary” fitting on a smartphone. The AI bubble is grotesque and will pop. The advancements in AI models will remain.
All this hatred and rage should be directed against capitalism and the plutocrats, but it’s being misdirected and turn out counterproductive.
The most straightforward AI policy we should push is to mandate AI metadata tags for images, video and text that must remain when editing. So you can immediately see a watermark or icon on an image or video in the browser. But do we hear this anywhere?
The issue is that AI is a force multiplier, and it’s being used as a force multiplier for evil. That’s a really big problem. It’s being used to destroy society, so of course people have problems with it.
I totally agree that AI is a force multiplier (for profit and seeking power) but what to do about this? What would concrete policies we could demand actually look like?
My issue is that this goes against fuckai doctrine: “AI is completely useless and can’t do anything, can’t replace workers, produces no intelligent output, can’t code, can’t produce images or video or anything really. Only slop!” According to fuckai, it’s completely worthless. So how CAN it be a force multiplier? The enemy is at the same time too strong and too weak. This is an example of the doublethink this requires and it’s my main problem. This disconnect with reality.
Not just is it disgusting just like other reality deniers (e.g. maga, antivax, climate, ukraine) who thought terminate and just verbally attack when they meet someone who disagrees, it makes it easy for this outrage to be used against us. If there is a resistance to AI, the AI bros could not ask for a less effective resistance to face. Look at the comments here, now they want to cancel George Lucas because he sees potential for visual effects lol.
I believe this force multiplier will slowly build up over the next decade. The AI bubble will presumably pop soonish, we’ll have a massive economic crisis (which started long before AI) and eventually we’ll find and deploy “useful” applications of these new AI models.
Of course, as a socialist, should I refuse a machine that does useful work? I don’t believe so. E.g. I see immense potential for these LLM models to be used for planned economies and other things.
So what policies do we actually want? I don’t see any demands except stopping data centers. Which is sensible. BTW even the Anthropic CEO called for a moratorium and regulation on AI.
The first should be mandatory electronic metadata tags for AI generated images and tags. The second should be slow down the speed of data centers and regulating that they need to be actually sustainable ecologically (e.g. solar and wind and recyclable batteries and water).
The larger issue I see is that our global economy, that the vast majority of money today is “imaginary”. It’s not backed by actual real production or services. We keep printing money, and people want to grow that money so we see this insane multi trillion investment boom into overhype. That is why even the anthropic CEO thinks AI is growing too fast. Imagine if we’d invest all that money sensibly. And that has nothing to do with AI really.
I mean, obviously I’m torn on it, like most things these days. Obviously it’s an incredible technology or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It’s very good at what it does well, and I do use it daily. I think anyone who says it’s good at nothing doesn’t know what they’re talking about, and anyone who says it’s good at everything doesn’t know what they’re talking about. The truth is somewhere in the middle. With that said, the amount of societal destruction caused by it, I do wish it hadn’t been invented.
I don’t have any answers for regulating it or anything like that, I’m only one person, but I am just disappointed. I do agree stopping data centers would be great. Having some sort of limit on how much companies can make use of AI would probably be helpful. Having some sort of limit on how much hardware AI companies are allowed to buy vs how much is reserved for retail customers would probably be helpful.
I agree that the vast majority of money today is “imaginary”, people are using AI as a money printer without it justifying all of that money through actual value.
I don’t think my takes on AI are all that controversial, but maybe I am mistaken.
With that said, the amount of societal destruction caused by it, I do wish it hadn’t been invented.
I don’t disagree but I believe this is inevitable and unavoidable. We could never prevent pandora’s box to be opened.
I believe the main thing is the loss of trust that you are talking to actual human beings and that massive amounts of opinion and upvotes on social media are just manufactured. Economic power translates into supremacy of political opinion and influence.
But this already began before LLMs were good enough, from content farms producing slop articles to the russian web brigades and other state backed operations, to special interests like fossil fuel lobby, Trump’s rise to prominence during Obama’s term with the help of organized operations by Alt-Right and Gamergate that Steve Bannon weaponized, the simplified smartphones that allowed boomers easy access to social media. The political correct mandatory narrative about Ukraine.
Basically we had bots long before AI and the culture war was already lost.
I don’t know when or even if it happened, but discourse now is drastically different than it felt a decade earlier. You’re either with us or against us.
One stupid idea I have is “Only a good AI in a browser can stop a bad AI in the internet”. Not sure about the technical feasibility, but terniary models can pack 27b LLMs into a smartphone. Imagine we could actually filter out a lot of disinformation and brainworms. Or have an LLM parse all comments by a suspected bad faith actor and make an estimative judgement on it. Make the internet usable again lol. Maybe it can be used as a powerful tool for good. But fuckai cuts off any discussion about this. The immediate backlash to an AI model inside Firefox was near absolute.
Honestly, I kinda agree, but AI is such a powerful technology that it’s a multiplicative effect. I do agree it was inevitably going to happen.
At least we can still tell that the other person we’re talking to right now is a living, breathing human - probably because of our typing styles and because of our shared hatred for AI. lol
I don’t think a “good AI” can stop a “bad AI”, it’s not really feasible because these companies are too powerful they are basically unstoppable at this point. A bot leaving comments to dispell misinformation is interesting, but it’d get expensive doing all of that scanning and replying. You would need something like a full societal uprising against them, which yes even the average person is starting to get sick of AI, but I’m not too hopeful about it.
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Some of the people doing the fan-based YouTube Star Wars videos are using AI and I can honestly say the short clips are amazing. So he’s not wrong in that aspect.
